The New Iraq

Updated Jan. 31, 2005 12:01 a.m. ET

The world won't know for a week or longer which candidates won yesterday's historic Iraq elections, but we already know the losers: The insurgents. The millions of Iraqis who defied threats and suicide bombers to cast a ballot yesterday showed once and for all that the killers do not represent some broad "nationalist" resistance.

The true Iraqi patriots are those who risked their lives to vote, apparently in much larger numbers than anticipated. "I would have crawled here if I had to," 32-year-old Samir...